And the Winner Is...

I really do pick the names out of a box and take a picture of the name I picked, then I email the person and post the winner and when they reply with their addy its a done deal.

Mary won the hollow pendant!
And Lea won the pumpkin and bat marbles!

Hope everyone has a very happy Halloween weekend. Its cold and rainy here in Portland, so I'm trying hard to stay positive and think happy thoughts. Words like: Enjoy! And big happy smiles.

Apple Cider Brewing

In honor of Halloween and all the festivities... I thought I would write a little about my cider that is brewing.

A couple of weeks ago we went to the apple festival at the Portland Nursery and bought 6 gallons of fresh pressed cider. We drank two of them :)After dragging them to Tim's place on foot (we borrowed one of the nurseries wagons to cart the cider home) the brewing process began.
First the cider was boiled with honey and ginger and champagne yeast. After sterilizing all the bits and pieces, the cooked cider was cooled and transfered into the carboy and left to settle. Tim has a fun little tiny apartment on Hawthorne that has an old bachelor kitchen with new appliances. There is a spot in his cupboards that must have been an old "ice-box" (you know, pre-refrigerator kinda thing)that perfectly fits the carboy with the air-lock on top. You can close the door to this cup-board and not have to smell the funk at all! Its so perfect!

For the first week or two this concoction bubbled and stirred like mad!

It was a yeasty dance going on inside that carboy. Kinda crazy. Its calmed down quite a bit now. In the next few weeks it will settle a lot, all the sediment gathering at the bottom.Believe it or not - but this will go clear in the next few weeks, by the time we drink it there will be no color left at all.

Hard cider is pretty easy to make if you have all the brewing equipment around. It just takes a bit more patience than normal beer brewing. In a month or so we will separate the brewed liquid from the sediment and then let it sit some more (although Tim thinks we could simply skip this step and go straight to bottling and let there be a little sediment in the bottle, I wrinkle my nose at this). Then once its clear we mix with more honey and bottle. This added honey will allow the cider to carbonate in the bottles. I like fizzy hard cider, non fizzy is an option, you just skip the last step and simply bottle.

I've done this once before. Starting in October when the apple cider is fresh here in Oregon and then popping open the bottles in May for my birthday. So its a long fermentation process, much longer than beer. Supposedly the longer you let it sit the better it tastes. Honestly the first time I made it, the stuff turned out like moon-shine! It didn't taste like the store-bought stuff either, it wasn't sweet at all, more like a wine than the cider I was expecting... but my oh my it was good!

We are making a honey ginger hard cider. Yummy. The cider itself (non-alcoholic style) is delicious, so I can hardly imagine what it will taste like when its done!

Happy Halloween!

.

Taking a Hike in MacCleay Park

Much needed break time. Seriously, holiday prep makes me tired.

I checked out MacCleay Park this Wednesday. There's a beautiful hiking trail that put us right to the Audubon Society . We said hi to the birds. Ruby the Turkey Vulture here danced for us, although she didn't perform so nicely for the camera!

Theres an incredible old stone building about a mile out in the woods that was a bathroom, but in the 60's the plumbing was all messed up by trees falling down and up-rooting. Now the building is a skeleton of what it once was. There are ferns growing right out of the stones, its quite beautiful.I liked this park very much. There's a creek, the Balch creek, evidently the City of Portland's first water supply. We saw trout in the creek, they are a protected bunch the "Cutthroat Trout". Oh and there is a really really tall Douglas Fir in this park, supposedly the tallest in any American city, 241ft tall. It was huge and beautiful. And there is a beautiful bridge that runs over the park, with a red metal sculpture that kinda reminds me of Calder out in the grassy field.

Glass Give-Away for Halloween!

Hey heres a quick chance to win some glass - give-away ends on Friday Oct 31st, 2008.

Win a set of these little marbles - a bat and a pumpkin face! - Enjoy!

All you need to do is leave a comment here (and your email address if you are commenting anonymously) and spread the word - Thanks!

Happy Halloween!

Today at the Glass Studio...

My friend Jan and I played around today with the idea of printing on glass. She brought over a bunch of blocks she has carved over the years and between her inking skills and my glass skills, I think we are going to make some super sweet art glass!!!

I'm so exciting, bubbling with ideas. I posted pictures on my flickr... here is a video, you can see a bunch of the beautiful blocks she brought to play with.

.

Halloween Glass Murini Cane

This Wednesday I am doing some live torchworking at my local elementary school where my friend runs the Sun program. Its family night and the gym is always crazy with pumpkin paint and pizza. I am torchworking outside, I've done this for 4 or 5 years now, making little halloween trinkets for the kids while they watch and the parents can buy them as a fund raiser for the school library.

Kids cannot resist a flame, and they are intrigued by glass. I must admit, I agree with them!
So every year I try and do something different (especially since the kids remind me each year of what silly thing I made the year before, and they come back expecting something new to add to their collection, happily listing to me what they already have). And may I add, I have to make something fast and efficient and not tooo boring (is it possible for glass to be boring? yes). Because the kids line up, snake-tailing around and waiting not-so-patiently for their turn to buy a little thing that I have made. Yes seriously folks, its kinda crazy. I've tried bringing things I've made in advance (one year I did orange and black beads - soft glass beads so they had to be annealed - and then I strung them on a headpin and put each one on a key chain for the kids - I didn't want them to swallow the beads! - and I did all this in advance so the kids could simply buy them, no waiting around in line for me to make one for each kid) and honestly they were confused and not so pleased that I would not allow them to buy the beads I was making as demonstrations.

So its gotta be borosilicate, its gotta be small (the littlest kids are not appropriate to buy the creations, I don't want them to eat them) its gotta be simple, fast and efficient - and its gotta be all about Halloween.

I did little pumpkins one year, and the next year glow in the dark ghost pendants, then little mushroom pendants (I figured the autumn type theme kinda seemed Halloween oriented - hey I was running out of ideas!), and last year little orange and black beads.


This year I thought I'd make a couple of simple murini canes, so I can make the kids little marbles and simply pick up a little murini disc on the end of a clear gather. This process is super fast and pretty effective. Good for short attention spans and early bed times (family night for Halloween night - kids gotta get home and go to bed). Its impressive the way a tiny disc of color on the side of the glass looks like a pumpkin face when viewed through the marble - the optical effect is like a magnifying lens.

So the murinis I had in mind were a pumpkin face and a bat.

In these pictures you can see the canes that I made - they are not too spectacular but they get the point across. A recognizable pumpkin face (although he has a Snoopy nose and a weird smile) and a bat (the bat is pretty ghetto, but hey, it ended up looking like a bat!) the white bits you see in the picture are bubblesThe idea of a murini cane is that the image you see at the end of the rod continues down the length of the cane. You cut up the can into little discs and then each disc has the image on it. A flower murini would be called "Millifiori", Italian for "millions of flowers" as each can could be cut up into millions of little flowers.
So on Wednesday I will make marbles for the kids at Shaver Elementary. They will get to choose between bats and pumpkins. I'll bet the boys go for the bats. I don't know whether they will be pleased with my little creations, I just hope they don't eat them or stick them up their noses!

You know the best part of this: the kids are all in costume - so I get to see all the little ones in their outfits, its quite cute. Makes me squeal occasionally.

.

Shout out on Cookie

check me out - good company inthis roundup of handcrafted mobiles!